The Active Class

“Fed-up professors say texting is the new doodling” is the national newspaper headline of a trend story that grew some serious legs online—passed prof-to-prof on Twitter and Facebook with amazing speed!

That’s because profs are also into sharing news in realtime via micro-messaging of course. And though we might not care to admit it, that means we’re often seen texting and tweeting during conference presentations and staff meetings, not unlike our students.

But students are texting and tweeting while WE’RE teaching! Therein lies the rub. Profs may be “fed-up” due to injured pride at our possible lack of interestingness, but we know that time-starved students’ attention is a casualty of the velocity of digital culture and deeply ingrained multitasking habits. At the same time, and just as likely, profs might be “fed-up” with all that Gen Y phone-tapping because we’re deeply concerned about student outcomes. Unfocused students fiddling with their phones in class can’t be good.

Or can it?

A study published last month in The Journal of Computer Assisted Learning showed tweeting students get higher grades. That research enjoyed enormous peer-to-peer promotion from edTech-minded faculty, students, and administrators (my Principal even tweeted it!). Turns out (to the surprise of how many?) that by live tweeting the lecture, actively engaged students are doing some serious thinking and learning.

To sum up the study’s implications: by encouraging students to livetweet the class, they practice valuable skills in distilling and reporting highlights and key points from the lecture or discussion. In the process, the classroom becomes both more transparent and increasingly connected to the culture at large, opening up possibilities for students’ friends, parents and other publics to actively participate or observe. This one simple mobile learning technology enables most key aspects of constructivist learning. And whereas texting may involve SMS fees, tweeting is free.

Livetweet P2P teaching

When classrooms are connected to the web through livetweeting, “students can become teachers,” to quote Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, speaking on a panel about technological innovations at schools at NBC’s Education Nation summit earlier this fall. With digital tools like phones and laptops, plus online access to the web (including Twitter) students “can teach their teachers; they can teach each other,” Hastings observed, basing the comment on his experience as an educational philanthropist and e-learning technology developer.

For teachers wanting to encourage this in their classes, step one is to figure out how live tweeting fits with learning objectives. For a journalism class at Carleton University in Ottawa, that wasn’t difficult—-the next generation of digital reporters knows that news doesn’t break, it tweets. In a recent lecture presentation where livetweeting was encouraged, one student remarked: “People in the class were all doing it; it really got everyone to actively participate. And even if they weren’t tweeting, we had the stream up on the screen for everyone to follow along.”

Once a prof settles on a course #hashtag and ensures it’s well publicized among students, it’s easy (and free) to aggregate the tweetstream using a live tool like TwitterFall. However, be on alert for hashtag hijacking—set up a moderator for sure. Tech-forward teaching is hands-on teaching.

Need more ideas for how to support student livetweeting? Check out this excellent presentation by Tiffany Gallicano, Assistant Professor of Media & PR at University of Oregon.

Last week I attended EDUCAUSE with the i>clicker and Panopto crews to talk about how to use a range of  technologies for innovative teaching in higher ed.

QR codes are hot!

Without a doubt the talk about QR codes in classroom and on campus was the biggest hit of all the mini-presentations I did, and here is the video: QR codes if you’d prefer to download or view just the slides, here they are:

It seems the barcodes are getting a lot of interest at the moment from educators and businesses both small and large. As more professionals, students, and educators adopt smartphones, it makes sense to experiment with mobile information sharing through QR codes. Although surveys of smartphone use put the figure at about 20% of the total mobile phone consumer market, in fact that number jumps to nearly 50% when we look at entrepreneurs, according to new research by Forrester. Among higher ed students there is a considerable percentage of smartphone users, but likely due to cost it hasn’t hit the tipping point yet. However according to Nielsen media, smartphones are projected to overtake feature phones in North America next fall.

Teaching with video

At EDUCAUSE we also talked with faculty about ideas for using video in teaching. Everything from videorecording whole lectures (lecture capture) to taping the answers to FAQ in advance. The video of that mini-presentation is available. One point that often gets mentioned when faculty debate videorecording the lectures is whether it will encourage students to skip class. This, despite reams of research to the contrary, remains a real point of concern. In this presentation we turned that query on its head, to suggest that if professors need to miss their own class to attend a conference, video recording some lecture material in advance may be just the ticket to increase flexibility for faculty. Here are the slides:

In the age of Google, do we still have to memorize things? Seems like a strange question, but many educators are experiencing significant pushback from students who resist memorizing information that can be found online in an instant. What’s the point? ask students, who complain about what they see as “an incredible waste of time,” when facing rote memorization or similar seemingly repetitious assignments.

A few years back, Don Tapscott (author of Wikinomics, Growing Up Digital, Grown Up Digital) made headlines with his pronouncement that for the “net generation…memorizing facts and figures is a waste of time.” Most faculty in med school, law school, engineering, history, music, and well, just about every department and program across every higher ed campus would likely disagree with Tapscott’s blanket statement. But his observations are (as always) insightful and provocative, and surely most educators would agree that ideally, creative, applied, problem-based pedagogies are preferable to rote memorization. And as Tapscott points out, today professors and students alike are letting the internet do some of the cognitive heavy lifting when it comes to fact-checking. But memorization still has a time and place in school and out, in the age of Google and even for those with the smartest of smartphones.

Speed-dial Memory

For example, last week The New York Times profiled a typical case that illustrates the importance of memorization for those (perhaps infrequent) times when even the most highly wired among us are unexpectedly unplugged, gadgetless and disconnected from the information superhighway and off the grid of our friend networks. When “Travis Erickson, 21, discovered that his cellphone had been either stolen or lost in the sand he also discovered that he was stranded.” Why? Because he didn’t know his girlfriend’s cell phone number. “I never had to know it,” Mr. Erickson told The New York Times, “because it was always in my pocket on my phone.” The journalist suggests that as “cellphone address books and other technological advances do our remembering for us” there may be a negative “impact on our ability to memorize” information. Not knowing his girlfriend’s phone number certainly had a negative effect for Mr. Erickson. She broke up with him.

The Times offered Travis Erikson’s story as one thread in the fabric of our information culture, where high-speed connectivity spreads far and wide, and more consumers opting for feature-rich, web-ready smartphones and dataplans. Today, access to basic information, fast facts, phone numbers, simple calculations, and real-time updates, are all readily on screen, at hand. Why memorize, when you can speed-dial or Google-it? Why memorize, when there’s Wikipedia and YouTube, crowdsourced sites rich with up-to-date information and history? Why remember when a quick status update nets your information courtesy of trusted sources on Facebook or Twitter?

External Memory

Clearly this perspective is more likely to be heard from the connected class, millennials, digital natives, urbanites, and lifehackers among us. Armed with multifunctional handheld consumer electronics in pockets and purses, we’re outsourcing our digits and data to Google, Facebook, Apple, and RIM. The result is increased productivity and pace in a culture characterized by instantaneity and information overload–but the flipside is decreased cognitive workouts.

Between mobile technologies, cloud computing, and Google-cached culture, it seems we are forgetting how to remember, and opting out of everyday memory work—with many none too worried about it. But back on campus, many are concerned with the cost of digitizing memory and resistance to rote memorization activities in the classroom.

Memorization and Analytic Thinking

When students ask, What’s the point? We might wonder, is there a negative impact on intelligence when we trust Google and Android have our back? In response, scientists are quick to weigh in on the importance of working memory workouts to keep the brain healthy.

And educators point out that memorizing basic building blocks of data is the foundation for constructing advanced knowledge and sharp analytic ability. “Having a foundation of knowledge is necessary for more complex thinking,” observes educator Chris Fritz. “If a student does not know and cannot discuss very basic concepts,” writes one insightful educator on Yahoo! Answers, “then that student will never be able to get to higher level critical thinking.”

Digital Tools and Memory Work

To combine the best of both worlds then, mixing digital and traditional learning styles, technoprofs and digital natives could consider using flashcard apps on their iPhones/iPads, their Androids/BlackBerrys, or any laptop a digital tool to help students memorize facts and figures while on-the-go.

As well, infographics may make memorizing information easier for students who respond well to visual learning methods. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then infographics are an ideal, data-dense, mobile-friendly learning tool.

QR codes (also called matrix codes, so you can see why I might feel an affinity with them!) are gaining in popularity in North America (they’re already big overseas in Japan and elsewhere). With more students buying smartphones, and more professors interested in developing mobile learning solutions, QR codes in the classroom are worth considering.

A QR code is a fancy “quick response” barcode. It can be decoded (scanned) with smartphone software (available free for all phones) and once scanned, it sends the smartphone to a website whose URL is embedded in the code. It’s a pretty painless process: open QR code app, hold phone up to QR code, take a photo, then click to follow the embedded link. Or, you can set up a QR code so that scanning it causes the user’s smartphone to open an email program and auto-insert an address, or to open the text messaging feature and insert a pre-fab SMS.

In business, these QR codes serve many purposes having to do with linking the physical and the virtual worlds. Pasted on store shelves, product labels, or machinery, they can provide user manuals, background information, user reviews, or mobile coupons on-demand and in-hand. The QR trend is catching on quickly in the real estate industry. Posting QR codes on roadside For Sale signs means mobile house hunters can instantly access all the listing details—and contact the agent right away.

QR codes are one way to “close the loop from print to mobile,” says Ted Ianuzzi, VP Sales and Marketing at Didmo. And as such, they are efficient “mobile Trojan horses” that can be used to distribute all kinds of digital content “on the spot.” So then, how might we use these fancy barcodes in teaching? [read more]

In this post I’ll consider two very different families of smartphone apps, both informational in function and designed with different kinds of learning and self-improvement in mind. I offer them as two examples of innovative digital initiatives that could inspire those in higher ed interested in mobile learning object use and design.

The AppCourse: Slick, Bundled, Feature-rich

When it was launched this year, the BarMax iPhone app earned a lot more press coverage than it did paid downloads.  Why?  It came with a price tag of $1K. That’s right: one thousand bucks.  At first (and I cannot be alone here) I assumed it was a mixology app for bartenders. I was wrong. I also thought it would be panned by reviewers as an outrageous idea with an unreasonably exorbitant price point. Wrong again. Critics agreed BarMax was well worth the cost.

BarMax delivered a total mobile learning solution for law students preparing for the California bar exam.  Developers justified price by explaining that this agile, premium content was on par with the information delivered through their in-class prep course, which is in the $3,000-$4,000 tuition range.

On a side note, I agree that “the thought of being able to spend $1,000 with one click on your iPhone remains a little terrifying,” as MG Siegler at TechCrunch observed.  Yet as mobile banking catches on, and users buy and sell stocks and manage investments via smartphones, and as more mobile commerce options become available, surely large-scale financial transactions on the mobile phone will be less scary—at least for some users.

Following in the footsteps of BarMax, another professional training appCourse, this one for only $29.99.  [read more]

Last month came big news that Hotmail is getting a major facelift.  Bloggers and press releases touted the new and improved, feature-rich, free webmail service as the Next Big Thing. But do millennials care about Microsoft’s latest and greatest email, even the super “hot” variety?

A couple of years back, Boston College made headlines when it opted to cease distributing campus email accounts to the incoming class.  The rationale?  Officials found that the accounts were very much underutilized, which meant email was an inefficient and unreliable communications tool for faculty and administration to use.

Why did students fail to regularly check their email?  Boston College identified two reasons: “because their life is somewhere else,” and “because they already have well-established digital identities before they arrive on campus.”  We know where those developed digital personas are: Facebook and MySpace.  They’ve been there for a long time.  “I need (Facebook) everywhere I go,” said one teen entrepreneur and panelist at the Mashup 2007 conference, “but I log into e-mail only once a week.” Yep, 2007.  Her comment was in response to a question from the floor—posed by a Microsoft executive.

There are several reasons behind this communications shift, including millennials’ need for instant gratification—something that email really can’t deliver. The bottom line is nicely summed up by ArtsTechnica: according to teens and twentysomethings, “email is for old people.”

The GenY trend away from email is everywhere, as students opt to use social networking and texting as their primary communication tools. Stats showed that in 2009 email sites were getting 40% less traffic than they had just five years earlier, while socnets were enjoying an almost 90% increase in visits over the same period.

Implications for Higher Ed

So, because they offer far more instantaneous and mobile-ready, status updates and SMS has been edging out email among millennials for years now. That means that faculty and administrators need to get social-media-savvy if they want to connect with the study body in any sort of timely and regular way.

Yet for the most part, colleges and universities are reluctant or refusing to get on board, and with the exception of some early adopter technoprofs, libraries, and admissions offices, are resisting launching Twitter accounts and Facebook pages.

So too do individual faculty from GenX and Boomer cohorts too often dig in their heels and refuse to compromise/cater to students’ communications preferences, habits, and skills. On the flip side, other professors are integrating these tools into the classroom experience, including at Bay College, Purdue and Georgia State. They are getting super-sized student buy-in for their trouble.

But realistically, for those who are not about to start tweeting and texting their students, email is the next best thing. To that end, using web-based, mobile-ready email services (such as Yahoo! mail, Gmail, and Hotmail) is the best solution. Unlike campus-based email accounts which expire upon graduation, these private e-services travel with students over the long haul. Of course, whether or not students will check these email accounts with any regularity depends largely on ease of access, mobile usability, and service relevancy—the latter of which has everything to do with whether their friends are using them too.

If professors, administrators, staff and parents want their GenYs to “get the message” it’s important to think strategically about which communications channels the digital natives are frequently using.  Because, let’s face it, media habits are hard to break, and not just for millennials. The alternative is for the “old people” to stubbornly opt to send messages on channels we think kids should use, or those that are most convenient for us to use, and then getting frustrated by emails that go long unread.

Recently in the news, a professor at The University of Minnesota gave her class a unique assignment: “Five days without media or gadgets that didn’t exist before 1984.”  That means no iPods nor smartphones, no Facebook nor Twitter.  How did the students respond?  With moans and groans.

In fact the assignment just described isn’t very unique at all. It is part of a trend of “technology or media fasts” that GenX and Boomer teachers assign to Gen Y students. The pedagogical goal underpinning tech fasts goes something like this: by signing off Facebook for a week, or refusing to use a cellphone, these everyday technologies will be made “unfamiliar” to the digital natives. As a consequence, ideally, the millennials unplugged will be enlightened about the role that information and communications technologies play in shaping their experience and knowledge of society and culture.

Not that far removed from course policies that ban the use of laptop computers or cellphones in the lecture hall,  requiring students to sign off digital services and put down their high tech gear is at base designed to discourage multitasking and inspire focused, critical thinking. Tech fasts are intended to increase a student’s self-awareness about personal media use habits.

Putting students on digital diets

We might ask: do college and university students, twenty-somethings in general, fail to think about their reliance upon digital media for education, entertainment, communication, and cultural participation? Do students in higher ed today fail to articulate about the place of mobile technologies, social networks, and digital media in their lives?

Not my students. In fact, no awkward (and some would argue, unethical and heavy-handed) tech-fast assignment is necessary in order to get students passionately engaged in excellent discussions, reflecting, critiquing, questioning, and contextualizing their everyday media use. All we need to do is create opportunities for them to share and discuss, online or off. I would venture to suggest that GenYers know far more about the enormous and intimate role that tech and digital media plays in shaping their identities, experiences, imaginations, and cultural arrangements–far more than most of their GenX and Boomer professors do.

On the other hand, there are some interesting, positive and powerful outcomes that could result from media and tech fasts. These kinds of “unplug” assignments would be an excellent demonstration of the pleasure associated with everyday media use rituals and habits—albeit through denial. Not being able to connect to information, friends and family, or to access one’s personal data, calendar, schedule, eBooks, notes, music—certainly this cultural disconnect will cause a serious level of digital pain, confusion, and cognitive dissonance. Consequently the “tech-free” course assignment would be a useful, highly personal, experience-based illustration of the digital divide, and what it means to be offline and without access to ICT tools and services.

How important, effective, and innovative is it for professors to ban technologies from students’ educational experiences and everyday lives? Is the impact worth the educational experience? Faculties are divided, and both sides of the educational technology debates are passionate and deeply invested in their perspectives on the place of media and computers in higher ed. Somewhere in the middle are the students themselves.

That students use text messaging, mobile web-surfing, and social media sites in the classroom is not news. Prohibited or not, the behavior is commonplace, according to self-reports from students who admit to using SMS even during exams. “Students feel texting is no big deal….even without the teacher’s approval it is common for students to text under their desks or even in their pockets,” reports one student newspaper in California. Not surprisingly, some professors feel differently about the textual distraction, and are often offended, confused, or even threatened by the loss of control. As such there’s a constant stream of case studies in the press about generational clashes over unsanctioned mobile media use in the lecture hall.

Not long ago, the issue was students using notebook computers in the lecture hall to surf the web and visit MySpace and Facebook during class. As a result, some professors opted to turn off the wi-fi and ban laptops. However, mobile phone use is far more difficult for instructors to control and shut down. Today most students have cellphones and smartphones that are web-enabled and complete with data plans for dedicated, private, and reliable service that stays up regardless of whether the prof throws the switch. This handheld computing is causing more technopanic on campus.

As reported by Inside Higher Ed, a professor at Syracuse University is so offended by students who find their cell phones more interesting than their professors, that if he “catches a student sending text messages or reading a newspaper in class, he’ll end the class on the spot and walk out.” Recently one high school teacher in Wisconsin had his perpetually-texting 14 year old student arrested. At University of Texas, El Paso, one professor is so disturbed by what she considers disruptive mobile technology (students texting while she lectures) that she confiscates phones and suggests we might consider a ban of cell phones while learning, similar to some cities’ and states’ prohibitions against the use of cell phones and texting while driving.

While “some teachers ban cell phones and laptops on sight, others figure, if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em,” observes reporter Jennifer Brooks at The Tennessean. Indeed, many instructors and professors who strongly believe in the potential of educational technology take a far different approach to texting and surfing millennials. Some design classroom activities using cell phones and pedagogical projects involving mobile social networking. As recently reported in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Todd McCann, an instructor at Bay College in Michigan, uses SMS to remind students of upcoming deadlines. When he launched the service, approximately 70% of his students opted-in to receive the text messages notifying them of upcoming paper due dates and the like. McCann commented that, rather than resisting new communications and digital technologies, as many of his colleagues do, he was instead opting to meet students “where they live“—in other words, to offer students support online. Also in Michigan, this time at the high school level, a pilot project (funded by a $250,000 grant from Verizon) using cell phones resulted in students’ achievement scores increasing by an average of 25 percent.

Students’ fascination with mobile communications technology is leveraged at many universities where mobile app development is part of the curriculum. This is timely because, as Malcolm Brown, director of Educause Learning Initiative recently observed, “Mobile technology has indeed arrived,” in higher education, “but are we ready?”

The answer at Abilene Christian University in Texas is a resounding YES, as the school prepares for the spring 2010 launch of Apple’s iPad. Increasingly, professors and students alike want to be connected “wherever they are,” said George Saltsman, executive director of the Adams Center for Teaching and Learning, because “we are becoming an increasingly mobile society.” ACU wants to be a leader in “understanding how mobility works in education and in society.” Likewise at The University of Illinois, professors were recently awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation to explore how mobile technology can enhance undergraduate students’ learning experiences.

From texting to tweeting, many educators are investigating how to leverage millennials’ preexisting technical savvy when it comes to mobile and social computing for educational ends—rather than fighting what appears to be a losing battle for control over a disconnected classroom.

image credit: woohoo megoo on flickr